Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Revelations of Divine Love and Zombies

by J J Cohen

Through a Facebook posting and the comments she compelled me to write on it, Liza Blake has made me realize that (1) there is an untapped genre of rewritten medieval texts that needs immediate tapping, and (2) Julian of Norwich was enclosed not because she chose the life of an anchoress, but because she was a flesh-eating undead creature and allowing her to roam the streets of Norwich was not in the cards. The good people of the city wanted to keep their brains inside their skulls, not on Julian's dinner plate.

18 comments:

Seriously, how did it take me so long to discover anchoresses? Buried alive, reminded repeatedly in the rules that they are dead flesh (you should not be a gossipy anchoress, because you are dead and the dead should not gossip with the living) ... what fun!

I vote for Ancrene Wisse and Zombies, or Zoombeye Wisse. Look for it on the shelves of Barnes and Noble soon, where it will no doubt be an instant bestseller.

‘The dead god is not a tired, abolished or doomed god but a god with its ultimate weapon of catastrophic devastation. . . . In the process of descending, the dead god rediscovers its . . . corpus as a pestilential but love-saturated communion with the sacred.’ Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia, 204-5.

How about "The Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Zombies"? Miracle workers, battle scenes between Oswald and others vs. the Zombie Hordes, the mark of the saint being the incorrupt corpse rather than turning into a zombie...

I've wondered how one gets to be an author in that series. I read the first, and thought it was great. I've got Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, now but have not read it yet. But really, how does one get in on this action? It would take a long weekend, at most, to rewrite one of these...

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Highlander. Gawain finds out that he's actually an immortal, and he feels the Quickening as he approaches the Green Chapel. And since Sean Connery already played the Green Knight in 84, he was obviously looking forward to his role in Highlander in 1986.

Plus Queen's soundtrack for Highlander works so well when you have lyrics like "Don't lose your head."

I've been giving this some thought, and Irena raises a valid point. We've already got zombies, so clearly we need to spread the good word. What other classic literary works need are a little sicko medievalist touch. Pride and Prejudice and and Anchoresses, here I come!